As the performance of antennas improves and costs are reduced, the potential applications for antennas rapidly increase. With the development of extensive satellite communication systems, the potential applications for antennas providing a broad overhead beamwidth are particularly apparent.
Specifically, the applications for mobile, ground-based antennas capable of transceiving circularly polarized signals are numerous. For example, such antennas can be deployed on fleets of vehicles to provide positional and other field information via satellite to a central location and/or to each other on a rapidly updated basis. For many remaining applications, however, the feasibility of implementing antenna systems will depend upon the achievement of even lower production costs.
Microstrip patch antennas have been successfully employed to address many overhead coverage needs. In order for such antennas to achieve required bandwidths for many evolving applications, however, the required dielectric structure becomes so thick as to be impractical.
While dipole arrangements have also been employed to provide overhead coverage, significant manufacturing costs are entailed for the feed system, particularly in applications requiring the transmission of circular polarized signals. In such situations, constant spacing between the feedlines and interconnections to dipole elements is critical and the manufacturing tolerances are therefore extremely tight.